2018 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
Interaction of language frequencies and working memory for Japanese embedded clause processing
| Project/Area Number |
18F18004
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| Research Institution | Nagoya University |
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Principal Investigator |
玉岡 賀津雄 名古屋大学, 人文学研究科, 教授 (70227263)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
MANSBRIDGE MICHAEL 名古屋大学, 文学研究科, 外国人特別研究員
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| Project Period (FY) |
2018-04-25 – 2020-03-31
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| Keywords | relative clauses / complement clauses / pro-drop / number agreement / l-maze task / lexical variability |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The processing of relative clauses and complement clauses in Japanese as a factor of working memory: using the L-maze task, the results revealed little differences at the head of the structure between pre/post-demonstrative attachment conditions with marginal effects of working memory capacity. For complement clauses, at the CC verb, difficulty was seen for object-pro conditions supporting expectation accounts. The processing of morphology in English by native Japanese speakers: using L-maze, the results revealed that learners with less proficiency actually had sensitivity to grammatical errors in English while advanced learners did not show processing differences between conditions of grammaticality, which might be explained by advanced learners' increased lexical variability.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
1: Research has progressed more than it was originally planned.
Reason
One paper on the processing of relative clauses in Japanese using pre-relative demonstratives was accepted for publication by the Journal of Japanese Linguistics. Another paper on the topic of scrambling in Japanese was accepted for publication within the journal of Gengo Kenkyu (a top linguistic journal in Japan. Additionally, another paper on the subject of the sensitivity to inflectional morphology and number agreement by Japanese learners of English was published in the Open Journal of Modern Linguistics. Also, a poster presentation was given at the CUNY 2019 Conference on Human Sentence Processing on the subject of Japanese learners of English sensitivity to interference effects during anaphora recall.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Research will be carried out on complement clauses in Japanese which will extend upon the previous studies. Items will be modified and possibly, more experiments will be done using eye-tracking. Additional research plans including Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Korean have been discussed. One plan includes doing further research on the speech act phrase on these groups. Also, a study using L-maze and G-maze as sources of implicit learning is planned to be carried out in Japanese and L2 English. Another plan includes testing the redundancy of the plural/group morpheme in Japanese using the L-maze task.
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